The deputy opposition leader, Sussan Ley, says the teals have not delivered on their vow to change politics in Canberra.
“These teal independents said they would change Canberra, but three years on it is clear Canberra has changed them, and Australians have seen that,” she says.
“They said they would hold the government accountable, instead they spend most of their time opposing the opposition.”
Translation: My party's parliamentarians are such ginormous fuckheads that even the advent of a net rise in the parliamentary collective IQ & decency, via the Teals arriving, has been insufficient to fix our blatant genetic shitfuckery.
Translation of the translation: We're arseholes, so that's their fault.
Inhaltswarnung: Transphobia | History is about to repeat and I fear some of our most vulnerable will be under attack By Rodney Croome
IMO Rodney is a champion, with far more courage & integrity than i've ever had, so it's nice to see him standing up now for trans safety & rights, akin to his own personal history of blazing successful trails for gay safety & rights.
I fear this coming election campaign might be as sordid & hateful for trans peeps as was the awful experience of the leadup to Marriage Equality. In the intervening years the RWNJ toxicity has only further escalated, & they will love this new culture war frontline.
I'm a transwoman, but will be personally untouched for most of the issues Rodney mentions in his article, given i'm not young, & not in need of transition support. However, i will very much be even more traumatised than i already am, simply from the escalated political rhetoric of hate & mockery of people like me, which is already bad but i think is going to get much worse.
Yay for the "gift" of having been born trans. Fsck it.
The 20th anniversary of John Howard's ban on marriage equality ahead of the 2004 Australian election is a reminder that another LGBTQIA+ culture war is likely to taint the 2025 election.
In 2004 John Howard amended the Marriage Act to make it clear marriage could only be between a man and a woman.
It was a move designed to wedge Labor and stir up homophobia for electoral gain.
It was a tactic adopted directly from the US where George W. Bush promised to ban same-sex marriages ahead of the 2004 presidential election.
A generation later the conditions are right for a similar election war over the rights of trans and gender-diverse people.
Attacks on trans rights figured prominently in the 2024 American election with conservative commentators convinced those attacks helped win Donald Trump a second term and deliver Republican control of Congress.
In Australia parties to the right of the Coalition will inevitably seek to replicate Trump's success by also attacking trans and gender-diverse people.
To diffuse this challenge to its voter base, the Coalition is likely to promise its own trans rights rollback.
The Coalition knows Labor is unlikely to push back because the ALP needs to win anti-LGBTQIA+ seats in western Sydney and regional Queensland - the seats that voted "no" to marriage equality in 2017 - to retain majority government.
I know some Labor figures would contest my prediction and declare the ALP is on the side of trans people, but let's be serious.
In 2004 Labor supported Howard's marriage equality ban to keep or win seats in Western Sydney.
Since winning government in 2022, Labor hasn't once publicly defended trans people from attack for the same reason.
That's very unlikely to change when an election is declared and the Coalition rolls out its anti-trans fear campaign.
I fervently hope I'm wrong. I hope the Coalition takes the high road, and Labor stands firm should it not.
But I was intimately involved in advocating for marriage equality in 2004 and I correctly predicted Howard's ban months before it was unveiled.
I feel it would be irresponsible not to point to the likelihood that history is about to repeat.
Should there be transgender election fear campaigns in 2025, what would they focus on?
A national review of healthcare for young transgender people is likely, as well as a ban on puberty blockers and hormones until the review is completed.
The likelihood of this has increased since the UK's Labour government put a permanent ban in place following a review commissioned by the previous Tory government.
Other possible election fear campaigns could focus on amending the Sex Discrimination Act to make it harder for trans women to play women's sport, and attempts to ban school courses, resources and groups that affirm young trans and gender-diverse people.
Such fear campaigns will be amplified by groups opposed to trans rights, including the so-called "GLB Alliance" and trans exclusionary feminists.
In the US, these relatively small groups have suddenly found themselves with far more resources in the lead up to elections where trans rights figured, and the same may happen in Australia.
Amplification is also likely from trans-sceptical media like Sky News and The Australian newspaper, as well as serial election meddler, Elon Musk.
If Labor is unlikely to contest fearmongering about these issues it will fall to the LGBTQIA+ community, non-government human rights groups and everyday Australians to stand up for trans and gender-diverse people.
Naturally, we should make the case that transgender Australians already experience high levels of discrimination, hate and suicide which fear campaigns make worse.
I believe another important argument, especially against a Liberal Party fear campaign, is personal freedom from government meddling.
Young trans people, together with their parents and doctors, should decide what treatment is best.
The government has no role dictating a one-size-fits-all response to the healthcare of young trans Australians.
The 2004 same-sex marriage ban eventually had the opposite effect to the one intended.
It led to a determined, persistent campaign for marriage equality that delivered a strong majority of Australians in support for reform in 2017.
I have no doubt trans fearmongering in the 2025 election would eventually have the same positive effect, fostering greater respect for the humanity of trans and gender-diverse people.
But before then, the nation faces a likely attack on some of our most vulnerable young people.
The more of us stand with these young people, the quicker Australia will evolve to embrace gender diversity.
Rodney Croome AM is a long-time LGBTQIA+ human rights advocate.
Support is available for those who may be distressed. PhoneLifeline 13 11 14
Inhaltswarnung: The Woolies worker strike is over — but their right to act is still practically illegal The Woolworths strike is yet another example of the staggering disparity between employer and employee under Australian industrial relations law.
The two and a half week strike at Woolworths’ distribution centres across Victoria and New South Wales finished up over the weekend, with workers accepting a new offer from the supermarket behemoth. The dispute arose from new(ish) productivity requirements being placed on workers.
“The new enterprise agreement won by workers breaks the link between measuring the speed of their work and automatic punishment if they fall behind — a system that effectively attempted to treat Woolworths warehouse workers like robots,” a United Workers Union (UWU) spokesperson said. The workers also received a payrise.
It’s worth being clear about this: this outcome was the result, at least in part, of illegal strike action.
As we hinted in the intro, the proximal cause for the strike — the excessive and punitive monitoring of employee “efficiency” via an algorithm that predicts how long tasks should take — isn’t exactly new. As revealed by Guardian Australia’s Ariel Bogle in October, the framework was introduced late last year. So why did the strike only commence in late November this year? Partly it’s because that’s basically the only time it could, while those workers and the UWU were in the middle of negotiating an agreement. That is the only time a workforce can legally go on strike in Australia. No other context justifies a strike under Australian law — not safety concerns, not widespread bullying or sexual harassment, and not a punitive performance management scheme.
If you’re part of a workforce that doesn’t have an agreement (which is the majority of employees), you have no legal right to go on strike.
Even during the negotiation period, there’s a topsy-turvy set of demands placed on the two parties. To engage in any protected industrial action during a negotiation period, a workforce has to apply to industrial relations watchdog the Fair Work Commission for a protected action ballot order and then conduct a ballot overseen by the electoral commission or an independent ballot agent. On the other hand, at the mere threat of a strike, an employer can instantly and unilaterally lock the whole workforce out of the business or, as Woolworths did in this case, attempt to break the strike by bussing in another workforce past the strike picket. An employer doesn’t have to apply to any regulator to do this.
And oh, the Fair Work Commission, can still rule to suspend industrial action on a bunch of different grounds — if it (once again) threatens to “cause significant damage to the Australian economy or an important part of it” or “cause significant economic harm to the employers or employees covered by the registered agreement”. The latter was the one of the grounds for Woolworths’ first official attempt to knock off the strike, when it argued the action had cost it $50 million.
There’s also the fairly nebulous requirement for “good faith bargaining“, which ultimately was the grounds Fair Work deputy president Gerard Boyce (hey, remember that guy?) used to rule against one of the key elements of the strike — the workers picketing the sites.
“It is clearly affecting third parties, including individual employees who wish to return to the work site, management and transporters or truck drivers of goods who seek to enter the work site,” he said. Again, its worth noting how sweeping this was. Boyce’s order not only required all UWU members and officials to allow any person or vehicle to cross their picket, but forbade them from:
[making, publishing, disseminating or distributing] any statement or representation … suggesting or indicating that any other person should do so, or expressing support (however described) for any other person doing so.
As industrial relations professor Shae McCrystal pointed out to the ABC, while declining to attend work as part of a strike is protected under the Fair Work Act, forming a picket line isn’t.
Some picketers continued regardless.
Outside the implications for industrial relations, the restrictions on protests on the grounds that it might “affect a third party” is hardly surprising — it is part of a long-term project to minimise organised dissent in Australia. As the Human Rights Law Centre reported in July, Australia’s federal, state and territory parliaments have over the past two decades passed 49 laws that remove, reduce or restrict our freedom to conduct protest action in public.
